Background Articles

Late last year one of the world’s largest credit rating agencies announced that climate change would have an economic impact on the U.S.

Polar bears live in a remote and inhospitable environment far from most human settlements. For most biologists, opportunities to observe these animals are fleeting. In fact, scientists' main resources for understanding basic behaviors of polar bears on sea ice are observations of polar bear behavior and foraging rates made by Canadian biologist Ian Stirling more than 40 years ago, combined with local traditional knowledge from Arctic indigenous peoples.

A new study has uncovered previously unknown effects of rain-on-snow events, winter precipitation and ice tidal surges on the muskoxen.

This is not the first time the village of Chefornak has faced the threat of erosion and flooding, but relocating won’t be as easy as it was last time.

On a remote Alaskan sandbar, under the watchful eye of a devoted scientist for more than four decades, climate change is forcing a colony of seabirds into a real-time race: evolve or go extinct.

When the European Space Agency (ESA) launched a satellite into orbit on Oct. 13, it did so despite opposition from Inuit leaders in Canada and Greenland over its potential to contaminate an important Arctic area.

Climate warming is likely to bring more episodes of heavy rain, above-freezing winter thaws and scorching hot summer days in the coming decades, says a study by scientists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Only 1,123 adult winter Chinook salmon, once one of the biggest salmon runs on the Sacramento River and its tributaries, returned to the Sacramento Valley in 2017, according to a report sent to the Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC) by the...

Need a reason to be concerned about rising sea level? I've got eight.

Climate change has warmed the waters east of Tasmania at four times the speed of the global average. But the heatwave of the southern summer of 2015/2016 was something exceptional, damaging fisheries and bringing new species to the island. It's a sign of things to come, say the researchers examining these events.

Warm periods are bringing the temperature up by as much as 30 C in the middle of winter

Greenlanders struggle to get their lives back together and rebuild the small communities hit by the tsunami earlier this month.

An assistant professor at the University of Alaska–Fairbanks suspects that changes seen in the auklet population on Little Diomede may be related to changes in climate.

huge tsunami occurred in the Karrat Fjord on the west coast of Greenland, resulting in severe property damage and casualties in the tiny fishing village of Nuugaatsiaq. The seismic energy detected prior to the tsunami was so large it was first thought to have been the result of a magnitude 4.1 earthquake. However, the cause was a massive landslide on a steep slope of the fjord where millions of cubic meters of rock plunged into the water below, 32 kilometers northeast of the village. Forty-five structures, including eleven houses, were washed away or destroyed, and four people were killed.

The whales seem to have died from starvation and washed up on shore from California to Alaska

A new report breaks down climate impacts on health by US region

Parts of the Arctic Ocean have become an “important sink of plastic debris,” mainly coming north from the southern latitudes—with 300 billion or more plastic items carried in ice-free Arctic waters.

The inhabitants of Lau Lagoon in Solomon Islands have lived in harmony with nature for generations. Now their entire way of life is vanishing beneath the waves.

Guyana’s fish production has suffered a significant decline partly due to the adverse impact of sargassum seaweed, local and regional fishery experts said.

This visualization begins by showing the dynamic beauty of the Arctic sea ice as it responds to winds and ocean currents. Research into the behavior of the Arctic sea ice for the last 30 years has led to a deeper understanding of how this ice survives from year to year. In the animation that follows, age of the sea ice is visible, showing the younger ice in darker shades of blue and the oldest ice in brighter white. This visual representation of the ice age clearly shows how the quantity of older and thicker ice has changed between 1984 and 2016.